Accountant banned for £160k fund diversion

An accountant has been excluded from ICAEW membership for dishonestly withdrawing £160,000 over a nine-year period from a limited company for personal use.

As reported on the in April ICAEW disciplinaries, London-based Peter Maxwell Featherman diverted the money to his own account without the consent or knowledge of shareholders and directors of the company between 1998 and 2007.

Featherman, a former 30% shareholder and director of the company who was heavily involved in it until 2008, said his finances became “muddled” with that of the company.

There's actually loads more fraud seemingly lurking around, now that I have crawled around in Accounts from Companies House (even abbreviated) and compared essentials with the person on the receiving end. And that's before we get stuck in on the Property side.

My middle name is "Nemesis".

Yours, Sherlock

a bottomless pit of fraud and tax evasion, the evidence all lodged at companies house.

That is what the Companies Act and companies house are there for. Why the Companies Act has not been used to prosecute more directors who knew, or should have known, that their companies were bankrupt and therefore trading illegally making the directors responsible for all debts, as possibly in the case of Glasgow Rangers, defeats me.

Congratulations. It is about time some of the big accountancy firms were found guilty of negligence or perhaps even complacency or------

And these were the ones who were caught. I'm afraid there is a lot of dishonesty about.; and people in positions of trust are (often misguidedly) assumed to be trustworthy. I dare say much more goes on like this which is not uncovered. The only deterrent is criminal justice which appears to be wanting in this (and other) cases where the toothless ICAEW or other professional bodies are incapable of bringing the memebers properly to book.

Despite what the ICAEW say about the basis of the costs levied, I am surprised how high the costs normally are, eg fine of £2,000 and costs of £3,500 for not having professional indemnity insurance. I would have thought that either you have or don't have PII so the ICAEW should not need to spend a lot of time establishing the lack of PII.